11 Signs You Need a CMO

If you are a Founder, CEO or Owner of a B2B Tech Company, here are 11 signs that you need a CMO on your team.

1.Your prospects don’t know who you are
First, you are the industry’s best kept secret, and nobody knows who you are.

2. Your message is confusing
Your message is complicated, hard to tell the story, and you lose people’s attention.

3. You look like your competitors
You aren’t differentiated and people can’t see the understand the unique things you offer versus the other options they have.

4. You need more leads
You need more leads.

5. You need better leads
You need better leads.

6. Your AI adoption is sporatic
You’re using AI, but it’s sporadic. Everybody’s doing their own thing and it’s not a strategic asset of growth for your business.

7. You don’t know how much to spend
You don’t know how much is the right amount to spend on marketing

8. Your don’t know what tactics to use
You don’t know which of the marketing tactics you should be using.

9. You don’t know if your tactics are working
There’s so many to choose from, and the ones that you are using, you can’t tell if they’re working or not.

10. Your team doesn’t know what to do
Your team doesn’t know what to do when it comes to marketing, whether it’s a marketing employee you have, or vendors or other people that are picking up the marketing slack.

11. Your vendors aren’t aligned
The vendors that you’re using are working independently and their work is not coordinated and aligned for the best result. 

Marketing Engine
All of these symptoms have one root cause, and that is that your marketing is a bunch of pieces that are working without an understanding of what the overall ecosystem or engine needs to be for your business to use marketing effectively in your industry. The role of a CMO is to understand what that engine needs to be and to put the right pieces in place, in the right order, at the right scale, at the right time. Now, you can solve the CMO need in a lot of different ways from hiring a full-time CMO to doing the job yourself, which may be what you’re doing today. The key is to recognize that without that understanding of what the engine is, you are wasting a lot of effort and time on individual marketing actions.

So I encourage you to put your CMO to work, whether it’s you or somebody you hire, and find out what your marketing engine needs to be for success, and then do those things in the right priority order.